


but my gravity's centered

by magneticwave



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/F, Pre-Canon, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-13
Updated: 2013-11-13
Packaged: 2018-01-01 08:40:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1042752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magneticwave/pseuds/magneticwave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because her father doesn’t really know how to do things differently, he wants Chris to marry a knight like him, someone who is solid and trustworthy and unflinching. Chris doesn’t want a knight, though. Chris wants another queen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	but my gravity's centered

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fleete](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleete/gifts).



> For fleete, in the TW Holiday Exchange, who wanted many lovely things but in particular to know how Victoria and Chris Argent met. My headcanon has been and always will be that Victoria Argent was forged in the fires of the New York ballet scene in the late 80s and came to hunting having already conquered the scariest profession in the human world and found it lacking. 
> 
> Many thanks to [treesahquiche](http://treesahquiche.tumblr.com), who responded to my Facebook message of “Are you bored right now? Could you beta something for me?” with an immediate yes.

Twenty minutes in, Chris is unapologetically bored and has limited options. If she crosses one leg over the other, the foot on the bottom gets pressed further into the heels that she’d needed to borrow from her cousin Mimi and cuts off circulation to her toes. If she keeps her legs uncrossed, she can’t stop herself from restlessly tapping her feet, which is rude.

“Are you okay?” Hank whispers, leaning over to hiss into Chris’ exposed ear. Her hair is scraped up away from her face, held in place by an uncompromising and uncomfortable amount of hairspray, and Chris wants to find the nearest bar and down three shots of Jack more than she’s wanted to do anything else in her life.

Because Chris is supposedly an adult now who knows better, she says, “Uh-huh,” falsely and obviously, and she uncrosses and re-crosses her legs. On stage, twenty feet from Chris and Hank’s impressively close seats, a ballerina is doing something painful-looking on one foot. The music tinkles alarmingly fast; the ballerina begins spinning and Chris feels sick just looking at her.

“Okay,” Hank whispers, and he settles back into his seat. He has broad shoulders that edge beyond the back of his seat, pressing into Chris’ space. Her shoulders aren’t dainty, by any means, but Hank is built like a truck. When he’d turned up at the brownstone to pick Chris up for the ballet, her father had introduced him as Henry, like Chris hasn’t been calling him Hank and beating him at target practice since she was in kindergarten.

If Chris thinks about this entire experience too hard—the ballet, the fancy shoes, the dinner that Hank had shelled out for that had cost about as much as the down payment on Chris’ new truck—she feels lightheaded and sick. Her father hadn’t exactly tried to hide how enthusiastic he was about Hank taking Chris out for a night on the town; he’d practically shoved Chris out the door into the side of Hank’s Alfa Romeo.

Mostly through sheer willpower, Chris doesn’t fall asleep. Intermission comes and the lights go up; Hank helps Chris up, since Mimi’s shoes have basically halted all blood flow to her feet, and offers a shade too solicitously to get Chris a drink.

“Yes,” Chris says, trying not to leak desperation all over him as they politely follow a trail of little old ladies with bouffant hair and fox stoles. “A drink would be great.”

“How about champagne?” Hank asks cheerfully. When he looks down at Chris, the thin gold frames of his glasses glint under the ridiculously overblown chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.

Chris hates champagne, but she’s not going to turn her nose up at an alcoholic beverage, not with another hour of this left. “Sure,” she says. She doesn’t trust herself to make a smile look authentic, so she pretends to be really interested in the view of the crowded main lobby. A woman who can’t be a day under 84 elbows Chris in the side when she doesn’t move fast enough out of the doorway.

“Wait for me here,” Hank suggests, and he deposits Chris under a marble pillar and wades into the crowd to valiantly battle for Chris’ champagne. She’d feel guilty about sending him into this madhouse for a drink she doesn’t even want, but it’s Hank’s damn fault she’s here in the first place so they might as well both be miserable.

There is no way in hell that Chris is going to be marrying Hank, ever. In the first place, he thinks the _ballet_ is an acceptable place for a first date, and Chris had to outsource a pair of shoes that weren’t steel-toed boots, which is clearly an indication that they’re never going to do well together. Hank’s an okay hunter, pretty solid in the field and good with a semi-automatic, but he doesn’t have the kind of strength that Chris would need at her back to build the next generation of Argent hunters.

Hank is also her cousin, which is gross.

“Hey!” he says brightly, reappearing like a godly mountain from behind a clump of guys speaking excitedly in Russian. Chris’ Russian is rusty and only really good for talking to sailors or hockey players, but she’s been trying to listen for something to do. They’re really excited about some guy named Baryshnikov, who has apparently outdone himself on the revamping of whatever the hell this ballet is. “Here, this is for you.”

Chris accepts the glass of champagne from him. She briefly considers downing the whole thing and to hell with the unladylike burping that would be soon to follow, but Hank’s eyes are bright behind his glasses and his tie is endearingly crooked, like he’d tugged at it on his way back from the bar but forgotten to straighten it in a mirror.

Since Chris usually looks like she hasn’t seen in a mirror in a decade, she appreciates that. “Thanks,” she says, and she takes a gulp of champagne and holds it in her mouth for a second, to let the bubbles carry the alcohol to her brain.

“What do you think?” Hank asks after she’s swallowed. “They’re good, aren’t they?”

Chris nods. “They are,” she agrees. She doesn’t _hate_ Hank, so she adds, “The—choreography? It’s good.” It has to be; the Russians have started babbling at an even louder pitch. They’re all skinny with big shoulders, so it doesn’t take Batman to figure out that they’re probably other ballet dancers.

“Isn’t it?” Hank gushes. “Baryshnikov’s really outdone himself.” Chris snorts into her champagne and then hides it with another sip. “I started getting season tickets in ’83, his third year as the artistic director here, and he’s just getting better and better.”

“Mm-hmm,” Chris says noncommittally. What the hell is she supposed to say to that? It’s not like she actually knows enough about ballet to sustain a conversation about it. If Hank wants to talk about exploding rounds, Chris can go on for hours. As much as Chris wants to not at all ever marry Hank, she’d still have preferred a quiet evening out for drinks. Maybe at a firing range, to work on Hank’s 200-meter shot, or even driving out of the city and going fishing. Chris loves fishing.

“Have you heard about Baryshnikov and Balanchine?” Hank asks, conspiratorially and low. He tilts his head subtly towards the pack of Russians. “They’re probably from across the square, at the NYCB.”

Chris has literally no idea what half the words coming out of his mouth mean. “No,” she says.

“It’s kind of funny, actually,” Hank says, pushing his glasses up his nose. His glass of champagne begins to tilt; Chris shifts her arm so that her glass is underneath is, catching the drops that fizz off the top. “Baryshnikov defected back in ’74 because he wanted to learn about Balanchine’s style, but they ended up fighting and Baryshnikov left the NYCB and Balanchine to come over here, to the ABT. People tend to be distracted by the tulle, but ballet is actually an incredibly vicious sport, for those who do it professionally.”

“Hmm,” Chris hums, with a slightly larger sip of her champagne. It tastes dry, like it’s probably expensive—but then again, all champagne tastes expensive to Chris. She idly wonders, as Hank gestures out of the opera house to presumably wherever this other ballet theater is located, which asshole told Hank that she liked ballet. It was probably Kate.

Hank isn’t done with his story when a bell chimes over the lobby, reminding everyone to return to their seats. Chris drains her drink and leaves the glass on the tray of a quietly hovering waiter. She wishes she’d had the chance to drink more of it, like the entire bottle, and she keeps wishing that as Hank finishes his tale of deception and betrayal and the house lights dim.

Chris actually manages to fall asleep in the middle of the second act, knocking out some time around when the music takes a downturn for the sad and the harps start featuring strongly in the orchestra. She wakes up to the shaking of thunderous applause; Hank is climbing to his feet, shouting “Bravo!” with enthusiasm when Chris jerks awake and hastily, clumsily, follows.

Hank wants to excitedly discuss minutiae as they filter through the crowd to the valet parking station; Chris hums in the back of her throat occasionally and, when the situation calls for it, nods. Hank is probably going to end up thinking she’s an asshole, but Chris is still shaking off the dregs of her particularly deep sleep—apparently Tchaikovsky is good for REM? The more you know—and on the caveman end of nonverbal.

It’s brisk outside and Chris’ new dress is fashionably blocky and thin. It’s embarrassing, because she’s sat in cars outside of purportedly abandoned houses with nothing but an Alison Krauss tape and a thermos of shitty coffee to keep her company but Chris can still feel a bad case of the shivers set in as she and Hank wait for his car to be retrieved.

Later, Chris will turn back her memory and try to identify, with her hunter’s eye, what exactly caught her attention. She won’t be able to figure it out, between the haziness of recent sleep and the low, rumbling monotone of Hank’s ballet-centric monologue—but Chris turns, stamping one of her feet in a too-small shoe to remind her legs that blood is a thing they enjoy, and she sees a girl, striding across the square in the middle of a flock of laughing, thin, happy people. They look like the cast from a Brat Pack movie, down to their delicately fluffy hair and brilliant smiles.

The girl in the middle has an incongruously serious expression and she’s dressed entirely in black; she looks up, once, when one of her friends says something, and she manages to look right at Chris, through the sea of people in furs and jewels and gaudy clothing. She looks at Chris, and she doesn’t smile but her face in its firm cast still catches Chris’ attention and tugs, like a lure. Chris wants to follow her across the square before higher brain functioning is restored and she realizes that she’s three seconds away from following a girl into the depths of New York’s nightlife without any reason more than liking the look of her.

“Jesus,” Chris mutters under her breath. “I need a drink.”

“Oh!” Hank says brightly. “In that case, I know a place!”

Chris knows that she is going to regret this; but she says, “Great,” with a truly palpable lack of enthusiasm, and out she and Hank go, into the East Village on a Saturday night to join all the people Chris loathes on a deeply personal level.

Apparently Hank is following a theme; the place that he knows is a semi-classy borderline dive that’s host to lots of skinny, attractive people wearing terrifying amounts of makeup. “This is where most of the dancers from the NYCB and ABT come,” Hank informs her as he relieves Chris of her jacket and drapes it over the back of her barstool. “Normally they don’t really associate, but the martinis here are unbelievably good. Too good for even mortal enemies to pass up.” He grins at Chris, lopsided, and Chris grimaces back at him. She hates the music playing but it’s not Hank’s fault that he’s the victim of some kind of huge conspiracy enacted by Chris’ inventive and cruel younger sister.

“What can I get you?” the bartender asks when Chris leans forward.

Before Hank has the chance to order her a martini, Chris says, “Jack, please.” She has a fake, but she can’t even remember the last time a bartender in Manhattan bothered carding her.

Hank’s eyebrows have rocketed above his thin golden frames when Chris turns towards him. “Okay,” he says good-naturedly. “Gin martini for me, thanks, dirty with three olives.” The bartender nods and vanishes and Hank leans an elbow against the bar, his grin growing into a full smile.

“How miserable are you right now?” he asks. “On a scale of one to, I don’t know, the cast of _Hamlet_.”

It’s surprisingly astute, considering how dense Hank had appeared all evening, and in light of that Chris slugs Hank in the upper arm. “You _ass_ ,” she says. “I thought you couldn’t tell.”

“Chris, you can’t act your way out of a paper bag.” Hank pushes his glasses up his nose and lets his head droop to the side, opening his mouth and letting out a quiet snore. “Did you think I couldn’t tell you were asleep next to me?”

“I tried to arrange my program over my face,” Chris says, caught in the middle of a laugh, “so, you know, no one could tell.”

“Yeah, because a program over your face wasn’t a dead giveaway,” Hank says drily. The bartender has returned with their drinks at this point; Hank hands over his credit card to start a tab and pushes Chris’ whiskey to her. “ _A la vôtre_.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Chris says, tipping her glass in a half-hearted toast before she drains most of it in a single gulp. “ _Ugh_. Thanks.” When her head isn’t perfectly straight on her shoulders, she can feel the solidity of her helmet of hairspray. After Kate had finished fussing, Chris had bolted for the door without looking it over; as she checks in the mirror over the bar, she can see that her hair is fused in some kind of poufy Molly Ringwald-esque monstrosity. “God,” Chris says reflexively, and she looks away so she can swallow the rest of her whiskey. Maybe it’s a good thing that girl hadn’t responded to Chris’ silent invitation; Chris looks like some kind of awkward socialite mess.

“Why’d you agree?” Hank finally asks, nibbling on an olive. “You sort of made it clear that you hate ballet, earlier tonight.”

Instead of answering that directly, Chris says, “What made you ask me to the ballet in the first place?”

“Well, Kate said,” Hank begins, and then he sees the expression on Chris’ face and cuts himself off with a laugh. “Oh, I see how it is.”

“She’s a brat,” Chris agrees with a wry grin. Her sister, who is currently ten but pranks like a nineteen-year-old fraternity brother, has a long history of doing things that will make Chris embarrassed just for the sake of seeing her upset about them. Maybe she’d stop if their father didn’t encourage her so much, but apparently he thinks her brattiness is a sign of initiative.

“I’m sorry that I listened to her,” Hank says, looking sincerely contrite that his manufactured evening of glittery Manhattan upper crusting wasn’t what Chris wanted. It’s pretty obvious that’s what he wants, though, and Chris is glad to have an excuse that isn’t “you’re my _cousin_ ” for when he asks if she wants to do this again. “Wow,” Hank says now, laughing. “The relief on your face is incredibly transparent.”

“You’re a nice guy,” Chris says, very sincerely, and Hank holds up a hand to stop her as he drains his martini.

“Point made,” he says drily. “It’s not me, it’s you.”

“It’s the ballet,” Chris insists, and Hank laughs as he holds up his now-empty martini glass to the bartender. “Can I have one of those?”

“Are you going to like it?” Hank asks, but nevertheless he orders two and Chris drinks it—somewhat gingerly, until it turns out to be gin, not vodka, and then she downs it with a small pleased noise and orders a second—and then she and Hank waste an hour of valuable Manhattan nightlife talking shop.

By the time they’re swapping theories about the recent downswing in the banshee population of southern Ontario, Chris’ hair is drooping into her eyes and she’s got her stocking feet propped against the lower rung of her barstool, Mimi’s borrowed heels kicked underneath her. Hank is four martinis in and looking fine for it, which is unfortunately a trait the men in Chris’ family didn’t see fit to share with the women.

Chris is far from dainty herself, but someone is going to have to drive them home and it’s not going to be Hank after all that gin. “You think it’s the native ghoul population?” she asks Hank derisively. “Really? Since when have banshees ever been shown to react negatively to a large ghoul population?”

“Sorry,” Hank says, “have I missed you getting your doctorate in preternatural biology, Argent? It makes sense, if you think about it. Banshees are death-sensors, and ghouls are basically zombies. I’d go crazy if I could feel all that death all the time.”

“Ghouls can’t leave the cemeteries in which they’re buried,” Chris reminds him. “Not without a necromancer or, God forbid, a darach. They’re too stupid. Banshees, meanwhile, _aren’t_ stupid, and would know better than to live near a fucking graveyard.”

Stubbornly, Hank says, “Ontario has the highest concentration of ghouls in this part of the country. There’s no way banshees are dying there and the ghouls aren’t connected somehow.”

“You should stop drinking those, if that’s what you think,” Chris says, tilting her head towards his drink. For the first time since she was pushed out of the house at six pm, Chris can feel her hair actually move in response. She’s pleased enough about it to smile at the bartender when he comes by with her tonic and lime, and that’s when Chris sees her.

Her hair’s been turned brown and gold under the lights of the bar, but Chris recognizes the severe bun caught against the back of her head and the series of sharp lines that make up her profile. Chris almost chokes on a piece of lime, which is yet another indication that she should really stop drinking. The girl might be with the same group of people as before, but Chris can’t keep her eyes focused on any of their slippery profiles long enough to check.

She must be blinking like an idiot; Hank half-turns, follows her line of sight, and says, “ _Oh_ ,” in a tone that Chris can’t really recognize. When his face returns to hers, she realizes that he’s grinning. “You could’ve just said,” he says, punching Chris in the shoulder so strongly she’s almost worried about it becoming dislocated.

“Said what?” Chris tries, but the girl chooses that moment to flick her eyes in Chris’ direction, and Chris couldn’t look nonchalant about that if she tried. Even if the red has been drowned out of her hair, the milky stretch of the girl’s skin rising out of the collar of her shirt makes Chris’s jaw ache—she wants to bruise that skin, lick the salt off of it, trace the lines of those clavicles until her lips go numb.

The girl cocks an eyebrow and looks unimpressed. Chris rises to that challenge like a champ; she smirks, winks, and doesn’t look away as she lifts her glass to her mouth and takes a sip.

“Does your father know?” Hank wants to know, at what potentially might be the least convenient moment for Chris to ever engage in a conversation about her sexual preferences.

The short answer to Hank’s question is _no_ , and the long answer is also _no_ , albeit with a very lengthy diatribe concerning the degree to which Chris’ father does and does not control her behavior. She loves him, of course, he’s her _father_ , but in two years Chris will be of age and her father’s time as regent head of the Argents will end, which is something she thinks both of them are looking forward to with some trepidation.

Chris suspects that the real issue between her and her father is a fundamental difference in ideology. He prefers a broadsword in the field—and he’d had to use it to make the rest of their family accept him as a temporary leader after Chris’ mother had died and the closest female kin for three generations had been Chris, ten and knobby-kneed and barely able to sharpen a bowie knife on her own—and Chris’ expertise is marksmanship.

Because her father doesn’t really know how to do things differently, he wants Chris to marry a knight like him; someone like Hank, who is solid and trustworthy and unflinching.

Chris doesn’t want a knight, though. Chris wants another queen.

“No,” Chris finally says. The girl has gone back to her conversation with what Chris presumes are her fellow ballerinas, but her hips are tilted in Chris’ direction like a kind of insouciant hint. She’s beautiful in a very stark, shocking way. You could probably move against her and very easily cut yourself. “Can you get yourself home?” Chris asks Hank, finishing off her tonic and indicating to the bartender that they want to close their tab.

Good-natured to the end—bless him—Hank says, “Yeah,” with a amused, semi-drunken grin. “Good luck with that.” He tilts his head at _that_ , exaggerated, towards the girl.

“I don’t need luck,” Chris assures him. Her father had taught her very early on not to trust in providence in the field, and Chris has been assiduously applying that to every element of her life since she was ten and her mother died under the claws of a moon-mad alpha spitting distance from Lake Champlain.

“Yeah, because when I picture a smooth operator, I definitely think of you, Argent,” Hank says wryly. “Take care of yourself. Give your father my best, all right? I think it’d be a good idea for me to stay out of his way for a few months.” He glares at her when Chris makes for her wallet.

Eventually Chris’ father will stop pushing her to marry Hank, Chris hopes, because he’s a nice guy whose only real fault is terrible taste in Saturday night entertainment. “Will do,” she agrees, tugging Hank into a half-hug and hitting him on the back with the open flat of her palm. “Call a cab, okay?”

“Aye aye, captain,” Hank agrees. He signs the credit slip for their tab as Chris attempts to stuff her feet back into her cousin’s shoes, biting back a curse as she nearly dislocates one of her toes. By the time she has her feet in order and is four inches taller all of the sudden, she’s a little flustered and has confirmed that she’s probably far too drunk to be attempting to pick up girls in bars.

There’s a little buzz under Chris’ skin, different from the one she gets when she’s halfway into the woods on the waning side of the full moon, waiting for the animals to go quiet. “Hi,” she says once she’s reached the girl’s side, leaning against the bar and propping an elbow against it.

The girl flicks Chris a short look, ghosting over her mess of a hairstyle and the gaping collar of her dress and down, for a few milliseconds, to Chris’ borrowed shoes.

“I’m Chris,” Chris continues. “Can I buy you a drink?”

The girl takes a long moment to consider before replying, “Yes, you can.” There’s a measured quality to her expression; she’s waiting for Chris to show her something, maybe, something worth her time.

“What are you drinking?” Chris asks, letting her voice trail off as a kind of invitation.

“Gin martini,” the girl replies, of course. She pauses and then adds, “Victoria.” Even if the pause feels perfectly measured, it’s not disingenuous. Victoria seems to have impeccable timing, just like her impeccable hair and her fucking impeccable cheekbones. Maybe Chris would be jealous, except she’s too busy being covetous of Victoria herself.

“Victoria,” Chris replies with a grin that’s probably a little too filthy for a crowded East Village bar. “Nice to meet you.”

Victoria’s eyes do their little up-and-down flick, one last time, and then she smirks faintly and says, “Mm. We’ll see.”


End file.
